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Nut Paste for Sandwiches
2 ounces of pine kernels 2 ounces of almonds 4 drops of rose water Juice of 1 orange Thoroughly grind the nuts by putting them twice through a nut mill. Put them on a plate; add the rose water, and mash them well with a knife, or a wooden spoon; add the orange juice last, and put into small pots and serve like potted meat.
A two-ingredient nut paste that stands or falls on how finely the nuts are broken down. The original relies on a hand-cranked nut mill run twice; a food processor does the same work but behaves differently.
- Quantities2 ounces each of pine nuts and almonds is roughly 1/2 cup pine nuts and 1/3 to 1/2 cup whole almonds — 4 ounces of nuts, plus the juice, making a single small pot. Scale up if you want more.
- Nut mill vs. processorA nut mill grates dry, producing a fluffy meal; a food processor bruises the nuts and brings out oil, which gets you closer to a spreadable paste faster. Pulse rather than run it, and stop before the pine nuts turn to butter and the mixture separates.
- AlmondsUse sweet almonds, blanched and skinned if you want a pale paste. Skins left on give a speckled, slightly bitter result, which is not wrong but is not what the recipe pictures.
- Rose waterFour drops is not timidity — modern rose water strengths vary widely and food-grade rose water can go soapy fast. Add two drops, taste, then decide.
- Orange juice lastFollow the order given: liquid added before the nuts are properly broken down makes them harder to grind smooth. Add it a teaspoon at a time and stop when the paste is spreadable — a large orange may give more juice than this quantity of nuts will take.
- ToastingThe original uses raw nuts. Toasting the almonds lightly first deepens the flavour considerably, though it darkens the paste and moves it away from the delicate, perfumed effect intended here.
- KeepingThere is no salt, sugar, or fat to preserve this, and fresh juice plus ground nuts spoils quickly. Refrigerate in a covered pot and use within two days; press the surface flat to limit browning.
- Serving"Like potted meat" places it as a bread spread, on buttered bread or plain crackers. Watercress or thin cucumber suits it better than anything strongly flavoured.
Vegetarian cookery books of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had a recurring problem: the British and American sandwich, luncheon plate and picnic basket were built around potted meat and fish pastes, and a meatless household needed something to put in their place. Ground-nut pastes were one answer, and the instruction to "serve like potted meat" is doing exactly that work — telling the cook where on the table this belongs. The nut mill itself belongs to the vegetarian kitchen of this period, promoted alongside the nut butters associated with sanatorium and reform diets, though how widespread it was is harder to say. The seasoning, though, looks backward rather than sideways: pine kernels, almonds and rose water together are a combination long established in Persian and Arab cooking and in the sweet-spiced dishes of medieval and early modern European tables, where rose water was an everyday flavouring rather than the specialist bottle it later became.